After all the blood, clarity

The principle of “no enemies to the left” aims at fostering solidarity and unity by discouraging public criticism or opposition within the left, even when ideological differences exist. It’s become a common trope. It emphasizes prioritizing shared goals and external adversaries over internal disputes, ensuring a united front against political right-wing opponents.

But the idea appears to be weakening, especially in the face of the cultural response to the October 7 terror attack in Israel.

In a recent article titled "The Day the Delusions Died,” Konstantin Kisin highlighted how some on the “center-left” have experienced a profound wake-up call when it comes to the threat wokeism and identity politics pose to Western society after witnessing protesters mobilizing against Israel while expressing solidarity with Hamas.

“A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives,” Kisin wrote. “What changed?”

The protests were not isolated incidents. They occurred in major cities across the Western world and, surprisingly to the moderate left, within elite American universities, which are considered bastions of liberalism. In one of the more well-known examples, 31 student groups at Harvard University signed a letter accusing Israel of being “entirely responsible” for the attacks last month.

In an instant, many white progressives, including those of Jewish descent, found themselves at the bottom of the intersectional food chain.

How could this have happened?

According to critical race theory, which has wholly captured academia and has been embraced by the adherents of woke ideology, Israeli Jews are “white colonizers” and promoters of Western culture. In other words, Israeli Jews and their allies are natural enemies of the left and subject to the woke doctrine of “decolonization.”

As such, terrorism, in the minds of woke activists, is considered legitimate political action in the pursuit of “social justice.”

To hammer this point home, Najma Sharif, a writer for Teen Vogue, posted on X on October 7:“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? Essays? Losers.” (The post has since been made private.)

The revolution always goes too far. The outermost boundary of what is acceptable for “moderate” progressives varies, but wokeism eventually attacks something a progressive is “conservative” about.

In this most recent case, that sacred totem is Israel and, by extension, Judaism itself.

Ronald Reagan famously said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.” This sentiment has since morphed into a new meme, recently popularized by Elon Musk, who posited that he didn’t leave the left — the left left him.

This is how yesterday’s “liberals” become today’s conservatives and how conservatism as a movement is constantly pulled leftward. This ongoing phenomenon can be understood through the “ratchet effect” and historian Robert Conquest’s second law of politics.

The “ratchet effect” in politics refers to a phenomenon in which specific policies, government actions, or political changes become progressively more difficult to roll back over time. Given how our country has become incredibly socially liberal from its conservative origins, this can also be considered the slippery slope argument, which is not a fallacy, contrary to leftist opinion.

The transformation is evident when we observe the progression from the LGB acronym to the more expansive 2SLGBTQIA+ acronym and the adaptation of the Pride flag into what has come to be known as the “Progress flag.” Consequently, what initially commenced as support for "equality" evolved into something more expansive, such as lauding drag queen story hour for kindergartners in public schools and libraries and the “right” of minors to undergo genital mutilation surgery.

At some point, adding one letter to the acronym or one stripe or color to the flag sends a few “moderate” progressives off the deep end, screaming that the left has “gone too far.” They will then declare themselves “classical liberals,” and conservatives will fall all over themselves to embrace them as their own.

Bari Weiss and Bill Maher are two clear examples of this. Each will give you “the woke has gone too far” schtick, and conservatives will pander to them while ignoring that, for the most part, both simply want to slow the pace of progressivism while being completely against the majority of conservative beliefs.

According to the Washington Post, Weiss "portrays herself as a liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture.” At the same time, Bill Maher is a self-identified “old-school liberal,” which means a Democrat from the 1990s.

Sadly, Weiss and Maher don’t understand that championing “old-school liberalism” is how we’ve arrived at the “excesses of left-wing culture.” Liberalism gives way to social excesses by design, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it is incredibly hard to put it back in.

So why does conservatism fail at halting the long march of “progress?”

The late historian Robert Conquest had an answer with his second law of politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

Conquest observed that organizations, institutions, and groups lacking clearly defined ideological principles and hierarchical structures, without strict controls on what ideas are accepted, tend to adopt left-leaning or progressive positions over time. This shift is often attributed to a perceived moral or societal pressure to align with the prevailing progressive trends.

Ideologically, we can see this on the right, as “conservatism” has become libertarian on social and economic questions under the guise of protecting “individual rights,” which is a centerpiece of liberal doctrine. Conservatism’s hyper-focus on “freedom” and “liberty” leaves itself open to the invention of a never-ending list of “human rights” and subsequent erosion of all traditional norms and values.

So can these newly disgruntled leftists help turn the tide against wokeism? Some on the right may view this wake-up call among moderate leftists as a positive development and rush to welcome these new disillusioned progressives into the conservative movement.

This would be a colossal mistake.

While it may appear politically expedient to court disenchanted members of the progressive movement, the solution does not lie in continually bringing moderate leftists into the conservative fold when they grow disillusioned with their own ranks.

Instead, it involves employing a political strategy of "divide and conquer," capitalizing on and fueling the internal conflicts within the progressive movement with the aim of weakening their alliances while, at the same time, practicing strict gatekeeping on the right.

The enemy of your enemy can become a temporary friend. But permitting disheartened progressives to shift conservatism further to the left will only hasten America’s descent into the cultural abyss.